Padres bloggin' since 2007

Moon Shots

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Longer than a tweet, not worth a whole post, here’s how I feel about the CBA, sans specifics.

This is the same process that brought us the brilliant free agent draft pick compensation program, which intended to compensate small market teams but in reality killed the earning power of free agents caught on the wrong side of the A/B status bubble. The social engineering / top down planning approach to negotiations makes it impossible to foresee the various incentives created and how they play against each other. Negotiators intend one thing but reality leads somewhere else. The more you see this stuff happening with the new CBA the more accidental problems the league is creating for itself down the line. Tom Krasovic alludes that smart people are already looking for ways to outsmart the system.

The Padres not only removed a piece of advertising from the batter’s eye for 2011, but replaced it with a San Diego Padres sign that fans have been asking for. It isn’t quite the scale some of us envisioned, but these things take time. Very cool. I hope to see more decluttering along these lines in exchange for the bigger pieces of advertising in the park. That’s a good trade-off in my book.

That boringification of the away jersey article yesterday caused a bit of a hub-bub, which was fun. Mentions in Big League Stew’s D12 and Brew Crew Ball helped bring more than 750 unique visitors, a record for our site in one day.

Lessons learned:

Controversy, and presumably my swearing that comes along with it, brings attention.

A game of “what I think looks good versus what you think looks good” breaks out no matter how much I attempt to avoid it.

Not being on Garf’s Good Boy List has its advantages. The Sac Bunt is first and foremost an outlet for Ray and I. Aside from fairness, we don’t owe anyone anything.

The Padres have signed second baseman Orlando Hudson to a two-year deal worth $11.5 million, according to Ken Rosenthal.

Hudson, who spent last season with the Twins, is a two-time All-Star and a four-time Gold Glove winner. Over the course of his career, Hudson has a wRC+ of 104, and a three-year average 108. Defensively, Hudson has a career UZR of 16.5 and a UZR/150 of 2.2 and three-year totals of -2.9 and -1.3, respectively. For 2011, Bill James projects a .332 wOBA for Hudson in 143 games.

Hudson will (obviously) be the starting second baseman, and I’d guess he’ll hit near the top of the order. Probably second, appropriately enough.

For the uninitiated, I started a new blog at the beginning of the offseason titled “Moon Shots,” in honor of Ryan Klesko and his lumberjack strong. Now it’s part of The Sac Bunt brand and to start things off, we’ve got the completion of the Adrian trade.

The Red Sox sent over Eric Patterson, brother of Corey, as the PTBNL in the Adrian Gonzalez trade. At 27, Patterson is something of a Quad-A player. In 1,550 at-bats plate appearances in Triple-A, Patterson has an OPS of .855, but this hasn’t translated to the bigs, where he has an OPS of .652 in only 471 PA. Keep in mind, that’s a small sample size, so it’s not as if he’s a bust already.

As far as tools go, Patterson has plus speed, which he’s used to steal 27 bases in 30 big league attempts. And while he’s spent most of his time in the outfield, the team sees Patterson’s versatility as a plus, so we might see him manning second at PETCO, in whatever capacity, in the near future.